Some Love for 3 Achy Workhorses Linking Staten Island and New Jersey

Todd Heisler/The New York Times The Bayonne Bridge, shown here, is one of three bridges that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey plans to improve or replace at a cost of $2.8 billion.

As a child, Angela Goethals had a fantasy about the 7,100-foot-long structure between Staten Island and Elizabeth, N.J., that she still calls “my bridge,” even though it no more belonged to her than the George Washington Bridge belonged to Washington’s heirs or the Lincoln Tunnel belonged to Lincoln’s.

The fantasy was that she and her sister would set up their own tollbooth. “It was sort of like a lemonade stand on the side of the road,” said Ms. Goethals, 35, a great-great-granddaughter of George Washington Goethals, the Army general and civil engineer for whom the bridge is named. “We thought we’d just sit there and people would pay a toll that would go into our piggy banks.”

On Wednesday, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey approved a plan to spend considerably more money than she had dreamed of collecting for a purpose she never imagined: $1.5 billion, from a public-private partnership, to replace the Goethals Bridge.

The Port Authority’s Board of Commissioners also approved face-lifts on two other bridges that connect Staten Island and New Jersey: $1.29 billion to raise the deck on the Bayonne Bridge by 64 feet to accommodate larger cargo ships from the Panama Canal, and $15.3 million to resurface the Outerbridge Crossing.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times The Goethals Bridge, seen from New Jersey.

Together, the three are sturdy, workhorse bridges, not terribly charismatic â€" the Goethals and Outerbridge are cantilever bridges, which are boxier-looking than swooping, sweeping suspension bridges. They are rarely lionized: David McCullough’s best seller “The Great Bridge” is not about either of them; it is about the Brooklyn Bridge. And there is the obvious: The three bridges connect Staten Island to Bayonne, Elizabeth and Perth Amboy â€" all in a stretch of New Jersey that many who do not live there consider drive-through country. Madison County, it is not.

“I wouldn’t call them the Rodney Dangerfield of bridges,” said Steven M. Richman, the author of “The Bridges of New Jersey” (Rutgers University Press, 2005). “That might be the Pulaski Skyway.”

Mr. Richman said the three tend to be taken for granted, a point echoed on the Staten Island side of the water.

“They don’t have the same profile as bridges that are more representative of the region,” said Maxine Friedman, the chief curator of the Staten Island Historical Society. “People think of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge or the George Washington Bridge as more emblematic, more striking examples. The other three just blend into the background.”

It was not always that way. The 1,675-foot-long Bayonne Bridge, the youngest of the three by three years, was described in a 1930s guidebook as “a great steel arch spanning Kill Van Kull without intermediate piers” and “the longest of its kind in the world” â€" a distinction it retained, by less than 25 feet, after the similarly designed Sydney Harbor Bridge opened in Australia in 1932.

The New York section of the American Society of Civil Engineers says no arch bridge surpassed the Bayonne until the 1,700-foot-long New River Gorge Bridge was built in West Virginia in 1977.

“It’s an iconic bridge, it’s a beautiful bridge, it’s important,” said Mark A. Smith, the mayor of Bayonne, said in an interview. “It’s important. It’s important to the citizens of Bayonne, the men and women who operate the ports in this area. To those folks, I would say, it would rival the Brooklyn Bridge or any other.”

The new roadway on the Bayonne will be 215 feet above the water. That will avoid real-life scrapes like one in 2012, when the metal mast of a cargo ship grazed the underside of the bridge, and Hollywood disasters, like the alien attack in the 2005 film “War of the Worlds,” when it was destroyed.

Unlike the Bayonne, the other two bridges were named for people. The Outerbridge Crossing honored the Port Authority’s first chairman, Eugenius H. Outerbridge. The entire bridge had cost about $5.3 million less than the Port Authority plans to spend on the resurfacing.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times The Outerbridge Crossing, seen from New Jersey.

And the Goethals? Ms. Goethals, an actress who appeared in both “Home Alone” and “Rocket Gibraltar” with Macaulay Culkin, said there was a right way to say its name. “It’s GO-thuls,” she said. “They often say ‘GETH-uls on the radio, or GOTH-uls.” (And for the record, a toll is collected on the bridge â€" for drivers entering New York. Going to New Jersey is free.)

“Not too long ago, my grandfather, who’s going to be 93 next month, heard a rumor that they were planning to rename the Goethals Bridge,” she recalled. “I said, ‘That’s an outrage.’ He said, ‘Actually, General Goethals was a modest sort of guy and more about the work than the celebration of the work. I don’t think he would mind terribly much.’ But I thought, ‘They can’t take away the name.’”

Will they?

“No,” said Chris Valens, a spokesman for the Port Authority. “It will be the Goethals Bridge.”

He pronounced it GOTH-uls.